I got a wild hair last week and decided to attend the Writer’s Police Academy in Greensboro, N.C. – I am there now, getting ready to start first session this evening. While waiting for it to start, I drove to Old Salem for a tour of the historical museum there.

Sorry. No Witch-burnings or hexes given. And I was so looking forward to that part.  BUT I did learn a few interesting things about how certain sayings began in our history. SO, here’s a history lesson (mostly related to the printed word) you might find fun: While in ye old salem print press shop, I learned that the reason we call Capitalized Text “upper case” and non-cap “lower-case” was because the big letters were normally stored in the top case (drawer) of the print-press. And, yes, the smaller were in the lower case. How logical.

The reason you are “out of sorts” on a bad day, isn’t because you feel strange, it’s because you miss-sorted the letters in the case and therefore, put them on the press wrong. You don’t have the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong syLAble, but you spillid it wring.
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And “mind your p’s and q’s” began because the letters looked almost identical in the box and printers would often get them wrong. So, if they were really out of sorts, the words with p’s or q’s in them would be a complete mess. Puite a Puandary (Quite a quandary).

Old Salem is a very cool walking tour. The town was one of the early settlements in the South.  It’s a German community of people that were known as the Moravians (sounds rather Star-Trek doesn’t it). As it turns out, they were the first people to break from the Roman Catholic Church. The first Protestants. Probably why many of them came here.

For you history buffs, you likely know much more than I about that. Although, I would have to stay we’re all a bunch of qansies (pansies) compared to people from that time.

One thing I found particularly interesting –if you were a white woman in 1786 of privilege (anywhere but in Salem), you were most likely illiterate, the wife of a farmer, the mother of 8 or 10 children (kill me now), powerless by law, and dead by age 40. If you were African American or Native American, you faced even harsher realities. As a Moravian woman (of any race), you were an important member of the community, and your education was as important to the community as the mens’. Single women were educated and taught to support or own businesses. Wow. If I had lived then, I would have stayed single.

Well, gotta go. Hope you have a non-out of sorts day! Grin.